Authors: John Shirley
He heard the Graywaters laughing at him. And that was good.
Wolfe kept walking past the building, on past the next one, a closed-down Dollar Store, then cut into the narrow walkway between the empty Dollar Store and the SRO flophouse on the corner. He stepped over a shapeless pile of rain-mushed paper trash and went to an old garbage can lying on its side. He turned the can over and set it up, and climbed up on it, jumping from there to the lower rung of the fire escape’s hinged ladder. His weight pulled the ladder down on its spring till his boots touched the ground.
Wolfe climbed up the ladder, easing it back into place slowly from the first landing, so it wouldn’t clang, then he climbed the rest of the rusty old fire escape to the roof.
It was windy, cold and dark up here, outside the cones of light from the streetlights. He could see a handful of baleful stars through a temporary break in the clouds.
Wolfe worked his way across the roof, circling old brick chimneys and vents, stepping over puddles formed where the black tar roofing sagged.
A cigarette lighter flared on the next roof over—the roof of the former Elks’’ auditorium. Wolfe ducked down behind an air conditioning duct, then slowly lifted up till he could see the guard’s face illuminated by the momentary red glow. The mercenary snapped the Zippo shut and darkness closed down around him except for the orange coal of his cigarette.
The cigarette’s coal blotted out as the man turned away. Wolfe smiled and advanced again, hunched down, placing his steps to make as little noise as possible.
He got to the edge of the roof abutted against the next building, stepped over, then ducked behind a chimney as the mercenary turned around and exhaled smoke, the red eye of his cigarette winking.
Wolfe wondered if he should take down the guy the hard way, or the easy way. He didn’t know anything about this guy. Some of the Graywater mercenaries had been Special Forces, in their times; at least the mercs who knew what they were doing. This guy could be Special Forces. He could be someone Wolfe had known. He could even have been Delta Force once. Be a shame to kill him unnecessarily. If any of these mercenaries tried to kill Wolfe, then Wolfe would defend himself with lethal force. But until then...
Besides, Wolfe didn’t have a sound suppressor on his gun. If he shot the guy he would alert the other Graywaters on the sidewalk below.
Unless he wanted to break the guy’s neck, he’d have to take a chance on trying to knock him out.
Wolfe sighed. Would’ve been so much easier to shoot him.
Watching around the edge of the brick chimney, Wolfe waited till that cigarette glow blotted again, then he crept around the chimney, pulled the .45 out, rushed up and buffaloed the sentry Wyatt Earp-style, cracking him hard behind the right ear with the barrel of the gun.
The sentry’s knees buckled, and he went down. He seemed out cold. Wolfe reached down, disarmed the man, and took the small flashlight off the mercenary’s belt.
Wolfe regretted not bringing along something to tie and gag the guard with. No time for that. They’d have a check-in on the ear comm. In a few minutes the sentry would be asked to report in, and when he didn’t reply...
Better get this scouting trip over pronto.
Wolfe took out the PearcePhone, and set it up to pick up the comm frequency. It took a little less than a minute to locate the channel they were using.
“Five, this is one, how you doing out front?”
“We’re cold and bored down here, One, what you think? But I got eyes on Two and Three. Everything quiet.”
“Copy that. Four, everything quiet on the roof?”
Wolfe tapped “hack into conversation” and, making his voice hoarse, said, “All clear up here.” He coughed. “But cold as a witch’s tit. Gettin’ laryngitis or some damn thing.”
“I can hear that in your voice, Four! We’ll send you relief in an hour...”
An hour. That should be enough time...
Flashlight, phone and .45 tucked away, silenced Mack 10 in his hand, Wolfe moved to the outbuilding on the roof that housed the entrance to the stairs. It was unlocked. He went inside, into a rising column of warm air and the musty smells of an old building.
He came to the door that led onto the top floor, pressed it open—and got lucky. There was a Graywater sentry walking down the hallway to Wolfe’s right, but he had his back turned.
Wolfe eased the door almost shut and peered through the crack, watching—till he saw the sentry turn the corner into an adjoining hall.
Opening the door as quietly as he could, Wolfe slipped through, closed the door, and moved off to the left. He turned the corner, hurried to the end of a short corridor, and opened the only door. It was dark in there.
Wolfe stepped through, closed the door behind him. He took out the flashlight, shone it around the room. Much of it was stacked with old theater seats; a big plaster Elks Lodge seal was leaning against the wall wrapped in cobwebs. To the right, a wooden ladder was built into the wall, rising to a padlocked trapdoor.
Wolfe slung the Mack 10 on its strap over one shoulder, put the small flashlight in his mouth, and climbed the ladder. It took three sharp karate punches, using the heel of his hand—with Wolfe wincing at the noise from each blow—to break the padlock bracket.
He pushed the trapdoor back and, flashlight bobbing in his mouth, climbed up to the attic. It was mostly rafters and dust here, he discovered, as he flashed the light through the low, narrow space. But on the right were pulleys with ropes looped tautly over them, probably relating to the curtains for the auditorium down below.
Wolfe closed the trapdoor and, hunched over, worked his way down a wooden walkway, two boards wide, laid over the rafters. He could hear an amplified speaker now, from below; points of light from the stage winked in the dust, here and there. Applause came periodically from the unseen audience.
On the right side, about the center of the attic, a shaft of attenuated light rose up. Wolfe made his way to the beam of light and lay on the boards, looking down at the stage to find he was staring directly at the top of the speaker’s head. He had a bald spot. The man was speechifying at a podium, reading from notes. No telling who he was, from here. Maybe that Marlon Winters character?
In the attic, the speaker’s voice was distorted and muddied by echoes, but Wolfe could hear most of what he said. “...the second and tenth amendments are under attack...There are forces in this country that have worked toward undermining the civilization that the founders of our Western European heritage have worked so hard to build!”
Build, ild, ild...
“We are threatened from every side!” the speaker boomed. “Socialism pops its ugly head up any time you don’t flush its holes out with poison—like the holes of rabid gophers!”
Gophers, ers, ers...
Western European heritage, Wolfe knew, was speech code for the White Race. But “rabid gophers”? That summoned up some interesting images...
“
Purity
is not just about saving our culture, our right to bear guns, and our right to a free market without regulations. We have created Purity to defend
civilization itself
against the forces who would erect a New World Order in its place, an order controlled by a dictatorship that will enslave us to decadent cultures and mud races!”
Races, aces, aces...
The crowd roared and clapped with approval at that one.
“And now, I’d like to introduce General Van Ness, who will talk about strategy on the ground...and the development of militias that will take control of our streets following the coming chaos...”
Chaos, os, os...
Applause.
The Elks Club,
Wolfe thought,
would not be happy at all if they found out who it was who’d bought their old theater. Racist insurrectionist scumbags.
The microphone started feeding back and Van Ness had a mumbling way of expressing himself so Wolfe could only make out occasional phrases. “...while we cannot discuss the means of setting the stage for...” Something, something. “And hence all we’re asking you is to be ready for the call to...” Something something. “...I have stood up for the values of Western European...” Something something. “...but in North Africa we saw again and again that whenever the locals were...And thus....and so you see...but again, we cannot...Yet the time will soon come to...”
Wolfe gave up. He had another agenda to follow up on. He had to see if he could find Stan Grampus here—Grampus, the assassin who’d tried to kill Aiden Pearce.
It was important to find the bastard, fast. Sooner or later, the Graywater bunch was going to realize that one of their own was down...and that something was up.
#
Aiden Pearce was using the encrypted comm system to talk to Pussler on a computer monitor. And Pussler looked worried.
Pussler kept glancing over his shoulder at the door, then looking pensively back at the webcam. “Boss...I’m telling you I don’t feel safe here.”
“That’s one of my own safehouses. The idea is: a
safe
house is
safe,
Pussler. Right? No one knows about the place but you, me, Blank, and Merwiss. So if anyone’s made out you’re hiding out there, it’s because you stuck your dumb head outside and got noticed. I told you to lay low!”
“I did lay low, boss! Ever since you told me that one of those ambulance guys told Tranter who I was...”
“He wasn’t supposed to know who you were.”
“Well, see, that EMT recognized me! I used to ride those ambulances regular, when I was using that synthetic morph!” Pussler grimaced. “I swear that stuff gave me overdoses about every third time I used it...”
“So why’d you keep using it, Pussler?”
“Well, ‘cause it’s what I could
get.
Keepin’ it real, I’m a drug addict. Or I
was...
I’m trying to stay clean, boss, and all I got here is....ah, almost nothing.”
“That girlfriend of yours been coming around?”
“No! She don’t know where I am! Boss—you got other safehouses that
Merwiss
doesn’t know about, right?”
“Merwiss?” Was Pussler really worried about Merwiss? The programmer had seemed harmless enough...although there were recent indications of a gambling problem.
“Merwiss knows about two of the safehouses,” Pearce said. “The one you’re in and the one over on the waterfront.” Pearce was careful to keep some of his safehouses known only to himself. “There’s three more he doesn’t know about. Including the one that Wolfe is in.”
“You gotta let me move into one of those others! I don’t trust Merwiss!”
“Why?”
But Pearce himself had wondered if Merwiss might’ve been the one who’d tipped off Tranter and Grampus to the meeting the day they’d tried to kill him. Merwiss
theoretically
hadn’t known about the meeting. Even Pussler hadn’t known till minutes before attack. But Merwiss had helped set up the cryptography that Pearce had used that day to talk to Pussler. He could have monitored the call and decrypted it, if he was fishing for inside information.
And there was another reason to suspect Merwiss. That gambling addiction. That made him vulnerable to being bought off. Pearce had recently discovered that Merwiss was in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He hadn’t been in debt when Pearce had hired him. Apparently he’d been “clean” from gambling for years. But he’d had a relapse into throwing away his money in the casinos soon after starting work for Pearce. He claimed to be in therapy for it now. But maybe he’d sold Pearce out to pay off that debt...
“Why do you think someone’s onto you there, Pussler?” Pearce asked.
“I heard a weird noise in the hall outside the door. I looked through the peephole and there was some guy hustlin’ away. It was a fat guy so I thought it might’ve been Merwiss but I wasn’t sure.”
Could Merwiss be monitoring this line?
Pearce wondered.
“Pussler,” Pearce said. “The mask is going up, right here and right there.”
“Uh—okay,” Pussler said. He cut the line and his face vanished from the screen.
The mask is going up
was code for, “I’m going to deal with this myself”. Meaning that Pearce was coming over there in person.
Pearce wasn’t fully recovered from his concussion, but there was no one else he trusted besides Blank and Wolfe. Blank never got involved in anything violent. He was only a go-between. He couldn’t handle this. And Wolfe was on an assignment, up to his neck in it at that old lodge auditorium.
Pearce had to handle this himself. It might be that Pussler was just being paranoid...
Still, Pearce had to know for certain.
He strapped on his favorite pistol, put on his leather overcoat and his cap, and hurried out the door.
#
Wolfe decided to take his chances in the crowd.
Probably none of these people knew him. Lots of them were casually dressed; and lots of them were openly armed. Being militia types, some of them wore Army coats from Military Surplus. His own stripped-down Army coat would fit right in.
He’d found a crawl space that took him over the audience, and then over the balcony. From there he climbed down a maintenance ladder into another storeroom and, casually as he could, sauntered out to the balcony. The place was jam-packed, mostly with men, everyone staring raptly at the stage. Nearly every seat was taken. From the look of these chuckleheads, there must be some major militia types in here, including some the feds would like to know about. And who was that? It was the Dousch Brothers, sitting together like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, surrounded by obvious bodyguards. The fat, lumpy-faced brothers were oil industry tycoons notorious for their “astroturfing” anti-environmentalism and anti-liberalism. Rumor had them connected to neo fascist groups based in Switzerland.